Steve Jobs 'played no role at all' in designing the Apple I or Apple II computers, Steve Wozniak says

Woz had been designing computers since he was in high school, he told Khemchandani, coming up with ingenious ways to create computers with fewer and fewer parts.Business Insider | September 03, 2015, 15:10 IST

Woz had been designing computers since he was in high school, he told Khemchandani, coming up with ingenious ways to create computers with fewer and fewer parts. There are two new movies about Steve Jobs about to hit theaters, but if you want to know how things really went down, talk to the man in the center of the action, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

14-year-old entrepreneur Sarina Khemchandani did just that, scoring an interview with Woz in late August.

There was, if you remember, some controversy surrounding how the Ashton Kutcher "Jobs" movie portrayed Jobs' involvement in the design and development of Apple's first products.

So Khemchandani asked Woz what role Jobs played with those efforts.

Short answer: None.

Woz had been designing computers since he was in high school, he told Khemchandani, coming up with ingenious ways to create computers with fewer and fewer parts. The first Apple computers, including the Apple II, were designed by Woz before he ever met Jobs, he said:

Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He'd never designed anything as a hardware engineer and he didn't know software.He wanted to be important and the important people are always the business people. So that's what he wanted to do.

I wanted to be the engineer, in a laboratory, like a mad scientist. So that was my thing.

The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed.

So I had created it and it was just waiting for a company. And Steve Jobs was my good friend, the businessman.

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